She's quiet again, and I can feel her thinking, weighing the options. Finally, she says, "When?"
"Not yet. We need to build the narrative first, make solid plans and build the foundation for a new life. But it needs to be soon."
"How soon?"
"A few weeks. Maybe a month."
She takes a sip of her coffee, her gaze fixed on the highway ahead. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"Yeah." She looks at me, and there's something fierce in her eyes. "I'm in. Whatever it takes."
The relief that floods through me is almost physical. I reach over and take her hand, threading my fingers through hers, and she squeezes back.
"We're going to make it," I say.
"I know."
We drive in a peaceful harmony for a while, the neverending road becoming more empty and dark. The cassette player is playing something low and static-filled, another 80s song I half-recognize.Bizarre Love Triangleby New Order.
Roxy hums along, her thumb tracing circles on the back of my hand, and I let myself relax into the journey. The paranoia is still there, the awareness of cameras and cops and every possibility, but it's manageable now. We have it contained.
Because I have a plan. And I have her, and that’s enough for me.
"Dom?" she says after a while.
"Yeah?"
"Do you ever regret it? Any of it?"
I think about the question. About the life I had before her, the isolation, the emptiness, the endless searching for something real.
"No," I say finally. "Do you?"
"No."
She says it without hesitation, and I believe her.
We're not good people and we've done things that can't be undone, crossed lines that can't be uncrossed. But we'rereal. And in a world full of people hiding behind masks and lies, that's the only thing that matters.
The motel we stop at is worse than the last one, peeling paint, flickering neon sign, a parking lot full of potholes. But it's cheap and anonymous, and the clerk doesn't ask for ID. It’s genuinely like living in a horror movie with how cliche these motels have become.
Roxy pays in cash while I carry our bags inside, and when she joins me in the room, she locks the door and sets her camera on the nightstand.
"I need to upload tonight," she says. "I have three buyers waiting."
"How long will it take?"
"An hour. Maybe two."
I nod and stretch out on the bed, watching as she sets up her laptop and connects to the encrypted network she uses. Her fingers move quickly over the keyboard, selecting images, adjusting contrast, writing descriptions in a language that's half art-speak, half code.
She's in her element. Focused. Living.
I watch her work and think about what comes next. The joy of a new life and a new state. To be able to live out in theopen without worry. It’s kind of exciting, the idea of killing our names and leaving everything behind, to start a new life from nothing. It would terrify some people, but for me, I've been dead for years. Walking through the world like a ghost, searching for something I couldn't name.
And then I found her.
